I walked towards my room and passed Poppy’s door on the way. The last time I had seen her was back on Safe Haven when I had walked into her room to find her chest open, but instead of tissue and bone, it was connective nano-wire and metal.

  Materials used to build machines, not humans.

  She had covered up and shielded herself from me while I demanded to know what was going on. Demanded to know what was wrong with her.

  In hindsight those questions had been foolish. They had been insensitive. They had been wrong. José was right; I should have tried to speak to her rationally instead of firing questions at her but the simple fact was I was scared, scared of the fact she was a thing that could destroy me in a blink of an eye, a weapon used in a bygone era of war where nuclear weapons were tossed around like toys.

  I stopped and shook my head.

  Not a thing, no. A person. Someone who I had confided in and who had tried to confide in me. Yet I had thrown all that back in her face because of fear. Since we had met she was nothing but kind to me, nothing but helpful; she had saved my life more times than I could count—yet I had thrown all that away because of fear.

  She had said little to me while I fired questions her way. The only thing I could recall now was sadness in her eyes while she pushed me out of the door and slowly closed the door between us.

  The next morning she had disappeared leaving me a note that said sorry. She told José she would be back but she needed time to think about things.

  That had been six months ago, and we still hadn’t heard anything from her.

  Part of me was happy because it meant the longer she was away the longer it would mean not having a conversation. Another part missed her terribly.

  Her smile. Her laugh. Her kindness.

  I came to a stop outside my door and rested my head against its cold metal.

  “Now there’s a look of a man who needs to release some stress.”

  “Go away, Willis,” I mumbled under my breath.

  A heavy hand landed on my shoulder, gripping it tightly. “Come on, lad, in times of stress I always ask myself one simple phrase. What would JC do?”

  “JC?”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I just want to—”

  “No. You need to come with me instead of fondling your balls in pity.”

  * * *

  Willis and I stood apart from each other in a nondescript white room that stretched out for miles. Called the Training Room, it in fact wasn’t a room at all. The two of us were connected via headsets while suspended in mid-air by cables that allowed us to move freely; the headsets were similar to a virtual reality headset that allowed us to experience different programmes and exercises.

  The only difference between the Training Room and a normal VR headset was that time passed differently.

  An hour equalled a day in the Training Room.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  VRs had always been highly regulated because allowing a machine to tinker with the brain was never a smart idea, but there had been a rumour of military organisations that had created the concept of the Training Room to allow their soldiers to acquire skills at a faster rate than was humanly possible.

  Not only did the Training Room make time pass faster, it also helped its users retain the information they had learnt or were trying to learn at a much faster rate.

  “You never told me how the crew got hold of technology that is clearly military-grade.”

  Willis shrugged his shoulders and said, “It fell off the back of a ship.”

  I stared at him but he didn’t elaborate.

  “Although we have spent countless hours in here, your gun control and aim is still shit, your weapon skills are, laughable and you still lose your head at situations you don’t need to. In short, you’re still a bag of shit and I don’t know why I bother wasting my time in trying to make you better.”

  “Why don’t you really tell me how you feel?” I said with an eye roll.

  “Poppy ain’t around to cover that skinny ass of yours anymore, and I’m sure as hell no Captain Save A Bitch, so you better learn how to fight and survive and learn fast, because dead weight doesn’t last around here long.”

  He stared my way until I gave him a nod of understanding, then he pressed the air in front of him, bringing up a display menu. With a few presses of his fingers, the environment around us shimmered and changed.

  No longer was I standing in a white room; instead we were on the streets of a sprawling rundown city that didn’t look too dissimilar to Paradise Lost on Safe Haven. Willis and I stood on a busy main street opposite a large crowd while we waited for the lights to change red for us to cross.

  “Now you’ve left your old life behind everything is different,” he said as the lights changed from green to red stopping the traffic.

  We walked forward while the crowd opposite did the same. Men and women in business suits, construction workers, teenagers who had holoscreens in front of their faces while they watched some vlogger on the net, women with overstuffed shopping bags, all bumped and barged past me, while Willis moved through the shoal of people like a shark.

  “The life you once knew is dead, you can’t return, you can’t go back, the Quinton Blake you once were is dead and thank fuck I say—that dickhead was a shrivelled excuse for a man, a man who belonged to this world,” he said, gesturing around him.

  “He belonged to these sheep. These sheep who abide by rules and strictures placed on them by others. To live amongst this crew, hell, to survive in this new world you have found yourself in, you need to dismiss all that. These people will fight tooth and nail for the misery of life they have, they will fight all the harder because you have something they don’t.

  “Freedom.”

  I could see Willis in front of me but he appeared to be moving further and further away. The more I tried to keep up the more the crowd seemed to get in my way.

  “You may think a mother of two would never shoot you between the eyes like a common street thug, or the businessman with twenty years’ service would never pay to have you killed, but I can tell you that your biggest threat is not the wannabe thug with a face tattoo, but it’s the people around you. The very people you used to call friends.”

  A woman in a red tight figure-hugging dress and with jet raven hair took my attention, as Willis kept on droning on. I couldn’t believe how similar she looked to Poppy, the swing of her hips, the curves of her breasts, the—

  “Dickhead, were you paying attention or were you looking at the woman who walked passed?”

  I turned around and Willis was before me; he had been over ten feet away when I had last seen him, but he had somehow covered the distance in the time it had taken me to turn away and turn back around.

  “I wasn’t looking at—”

  “She reminded you of Poppy, didn’t she?”

  I shrugged.

  “Look again.”

  I did as he requested and leapt back as the same woman I had seen before was now holding a gun pointed in my direction. She was frozen in time like everything else around us.

  “You lose focus for one minute—one fucking minute!—and it will cost you your life. I understand how you feel about Poppy but until she returns the missions will be hard. She carried a lot of the weight in this crew, a lot of weight that you will now have to bear until she comes back.”

  “So her leaving is my fault? I asked.

  “Well, dickface, let’s put it like this. Everyone knew what she was long before you come along. Once you arrived shit changed for the worse in my opinion. I don’t know what she saw in you, and I still don’t, but the Lord works in mysterious ways and I have to work with what I am given, so until we reach Safe Haven this shall be your life, until I say so. You will train and keep on training until you can hold your own.”

  “Willis, I’m not in the mood for—”

  “Computer, begin the simulation, and only allow exit from simulation upon my notification,” and with that he was gone, leaving me locked inside this stupid game.